We Have Been Here Before
by Ichabod Grue
Summary: The dignified, responsible eldest child, man of the house in the absence of his father; the troubled, misunderstood second son; the beautiful elder daughter; and the bright, ebullient younger daughter ... I couldn't help but draw the parallels. The family that Pevensie described were like the Flytes reborn, and I could only hope that they did not make the same mistakes.


_Brideshead, 1944._

The doors of the chapel were cool, welcoming beneath my hand. I wondered if Julia still used it. Bridey, I knew, conscientiously attended at Westminster with his wife and stepchildren, and Sebastian was still tottering through that sad half-life of his in Tunisia. Cordelia was somewhere in the Palestine with a detachment of volunteer nurses. I remembered how I'd pitied her, the last time we'd met, yet it sometimes seemed to me that, of all the Flytes, she had come out the happiest.

I pushed the doors open just wide enough to slip inside. Moonlight sliced through the darkness; pews emerged chiarascuro from either side. A figure in the second pew, unmistakably male, turned his head at my entrance. For a moment, I thought, "Sebastian?"—but it was only Pevensie. He stood swiftly and made to salute, but I waved away the formality, and he returned to his knees, his face towards the altar.

I hadn't thought Pevensie to be particularly religious. He was young—dreadfully young. I wondered if he'd lied about his age, to enlist. Too young or not, his reports were generally positive: a formidable opponent at hand-to-hand; exemplary leadership skills, definitely officer material; would be a brilliant stategist if he got his head out of the middle ages and into a time that employed machine guns. No, not "if" but "when": he was a quick learner, and if he lived through this, the Army would be glad to have him on a permanent basis.

We knelt together for something like fifteen minutes before sitting back in the pew.

"I wasn't expecting to find you here," I said, to break the silence.

"Religion isn't quite the fashionable thing, is it, sir?" He flashed a crooked grin, and I thought again how young he looked.

I shook my head. I thought about Hooper, and remembered that Pevensie and Hooper did not get along. Pevensie had once described Hooper as being "like my Uncle Harold, but less interesting". I said: "I take it that your family isn't particularly religious?"

"No. We went to church at Christmas and Easter, mostly to keep up appearances. Then, when I was thi- fifteen, when the bombings first began, my siblings and I were evacuated to the countryside, to the house of Professor Kirke. You might say we had a religious experience there. Things changed. Oh, not at first, and not quite like this. I—" He stopped, frowning.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," I said. Heaven knows, my own conversion process was complicated enough.

"It's still happening," said Pevensie carefully, as though these things could be identified as they happened. "I'm not sure Edmund and Lucy see it yet. Lucy only understands it by instinct—in a way, she understands it better than any of us—but she's never had it put into proper words."

When I expressed my ignorance of "Edmund" and "Lucy", Pevensie elaborated: "They're my younger brother and sister. There's me, then Susan, then Edmund, and Lucy is the youngest. Susan's in America right now with our parents—our father's on a lecture tour—while Edmund and Lucy are staying with relatives in Cambridge. None of them except Father knows I'm here: they all think I'm staying with Professor Kirke, studying for my entrance to Oxford."

As Pevensie continued to describe his siblings, I could not help but draw parallels between them and the Flytes: the dignified, responsible eldest child, man of the house in the absence of his father; the troubled, misunderstood second son; the beautiful elder daughter; and the bright, ebullient younger daughter, filled with light and love and faith. Pevensie didn't have the same stodgy sort of dignity as Bridey, but I'd seen him manage a regal air that could rival any royal house in Europe. Bridey might be a king, I thought suddenly, but Pevensie is a _warrior_ king—and there lies the difference.

Happily, from what Pevensie was telling me, it appeared that Edmund had been saved from whatever spiritual ailment had been eating away at his soul, and was unlikely to follow in Sebastian's footsteps. I wondered what Pevensie would have said if his brother's sweet tooth had been instead a predilection for alcohol, as it had been with Sebastian: no-one, I thought, ever estranged himself from his family over chocolate truffles, or sugar plums, or Turkish Delight, and I rather wished that things had been so simple with Sebastian. And it could only be hoped that Susan would not marry another Rex Mottram, that she would avoid the sadness that I knew was now a distinctive character trait of Julia's. ("Such a lovely lady, but so sad" everyone said.) I deeply regretted my hope, thrown out in the bitterness of our last parting, that her heart would break.

"Your sister Lucy reminds me of a girl I once knew," I said. "Lady Cordelia Flyte. She's the younger sister of the woman who owns this house."

Pevensie was quick to grasp the implications. "You've been here before."

I smiled. "Come along. I want to show you something."

I took Pevensie to the garden room. Every day had seen a new indignity visited on the murals, the panels, the medallions that I'd painted in those long-ago, Arcadian days; and I'd forgotten, or ignored, how the instances of vandalism added up. That spark of boyish pride, when I'd asked Pevensie to come along, suddenly left me. Pevensie said: "It was you who painted all this, sir?" When I nodded, he shone the torch over some of the graffiti and said: "I caught some of the others at it, and I did tell them to stop, sir. I'm sorry about what happened. It's a crying shame."

"Nothing you could do about it, Pevensie, short of sitting in here twenty-four hours a day with a shotgun across your knees. You're wanted elsewhere, you know."

"Someone should be able to clean this off. Or, I suppose, you could always paint over the more damaged pieces again."

I shook my head. "No. That part of my life is over now. I haven't picked up a brush since..." I didn't like to think about it. Anthony Blanche's criticism, what he'd told me after that last exhibition, still stung.

Pevensie, meanwhile, was bending down to inspect a panel where I'd painted that Biblical image of a lion laying down with a lamb. Someone had drawn a woman with a tall chef's hat—at least, I assumed that the vertically-striped rectangle was meant to be a chef's hat—standing over the lion with an upraised knife and a malicious grin. The torch shook in Pevensie's hand, and I hastened to reassure him. "Anyway, I painted all of this a long time ago, before I actually learnt anything about art and painting. It's nothing, really. I just wanted to show you how I was connected to the house."

He swiped his sleeve across his eyes—was he actually crying?—and swivelled the torch around to the opposite wall. Four huntsmen rode through a green forest, chasing a stag. I'd never finished this panel: the stag had only been sketched in, and looked ghostly white against the dark background. "That one was a bit of a joke between Lady Cordelia and myself. I gave the huntsmen the faces of Cordelia and her siblings. There's Lord Brideshead—we all called him Bridey—in the lead, looking very solemn and grave. The next two are Julia and Sebastian, with the hunting horns. Only Sebastian's horn is really a drinking horn—I didn't understand then how the drink would ruin him, and thought it only a joke. And bringing up the rear, of course, is Cordelia herself."

Pevensie was very quiet, playing the torchlight over the scene. Finally, he whispered: "Tell me about them. What are they like?"

So I told him everything. Almost everything. I told him how I'd met Sebastian, and how Brideshead had seemed to me an Arcadian Paradise in those far-off days. Lady Marchmain, Venice, Lord Marchmain and his mistress. How Julia had married Rex Mottram and how that had turned out—Pevensie muttered something that sounded like "a second Robert Ashe"—and how my own marriage had failed. Sebastian's alcoholism. How Lord Marchmain had returned, after so many years, to die at Brideshead, and how he'd left the house to Julia... It certainly would not have done to have explained the nature of my relationship with Julia, but it wouldn't have been hard to guess. I think Pevensie did guess.

When I finished, he said: "You don't think I'm anything like Lord Brideshead, do you?" When I hesitated, he laughed. "You do! Well, I suppose there are some people out there who see me that way. You have to grow up jolly quick when you've got three younger siblings to watch over."

"I think Bridey was already well past middle-aged when he was born."

We were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder now, at the far wall. Lights out had been called hours ago, but neither of us cared. Pevensie continued to play the beam of his torch over the walls, focussing now on the architectural elements. "Seems a shame to be Lord Brideshead, and not have Brideshead itself."

"He's actually the Marquess of Marchmain now that his father is gone. And Lady Julia needs the property more than he does."

"All the same. It's like being a king without a kingdom. I wonder what our home would be like if Ed and Lu and I were gone, and only Su were left."

Brideshead without Sebastian, Cordelia and Bridey. I never much cared for Bridey, but Pevensie was right. It did seem wrong. And though I had compared Cordelia to Lucy earlier, I hadn't meant to express to Pevensie what I saw of the similarity between the two families. "I wouldn't wish Sebastian's fate on anyone, even if Cordelia made it sound so touchingly romantic. You should be glad your brother isn't headed that way."

"I am. Believe me, I am." The torchlight settled, once again, on the panel with the lion. "You said you don't paint anymore. Whyever not? If I could paint like that, I'd never stop."

"Because I've lost the ability to paint the truth, Pevensie." That got his attention. "I don't know if you've seen any of my later work. It's all coffee table fare. I tried going into the wilderness, to find that vital, primal something again, and it didn't work. Everything comes out tame, picturesque ... so pretty and so very suitable for polite conversation ... so damn _charming_...!"

"And what is wrong with that?"

"Even that lion, which I did before I knew what I was doing, has something of the wild in him..."

Pevensie eyed the lion. He whispered: "He isn't a _tame_ lion ... I see..."

"He isn't meant to be."

Pevensie stared for a long time, and then he turned to me and said: "Captain Ryder, sir, I may not know a thing about painting, but I think ... I think that if it's beautiful, that's all that ought to matter. Things are only beautiful if there's something of the truth about them. And of course, the lion doesn't come just because you call. Sometimes you just need to wait and give him time, but don't give up ... maybe you need to paint for yourself, and not care who sees it. Maybe you need to paint for the sake of painting, and not for the finished picture. You won't see the lion again if you don't keep looking. You won't find the truth in beauty if you stop looking for beauty."

I couldn't help a sardonic smirk. Was I to take lessons in painting and philosophy from a raw soldier less than half my age? But the eyes that he'd turned on me were older even than Bridey's, and wiser than Cordelia's. "I'll keep that in mind," I said lightly. "If we get out of this war alive, I'll see what a few new tubes of oil paints can do."

Pevensie smiled and stood up. He stretched and yawned—we were really well past our Army-mandated bedtime. "By the way, Captain. Your first initial is C. That wouldn't happen to stand for Caspian, would it?"

"It's Charles. Why Caspian?"

He shrugged. "You just remind me of someone. You could say he was a convert too, though he'd lived his whole life in ... in Arcadia. I bid you a goodnight, sir."

Pevensie turned on his heel and hurried off before I could ask him what he meant. I watched him go, studying the shape of his back and the carriage of his head, then I trudged back to my quarters. I sat down at my desk and stared blankly at the wall for a few minutes. On a whim, I picked up a pencil stub and began idly sketching on a loose sheet of foolscap.

The Pevensies really did seem like the Flytes reborn, like a second chance. I prayed that Pevensie would come out of this alive: he was only a boy, and for all his fighting prowess and tactical acumen, what could he possibly know about the realities of war? What need he know? The destruction of that family by the removal of even one element would be as bad as the destruction of Bridehead itself...

Glancing back at the foolscap, I saw that I'd sketched a picture of Pevensie in armour, swinging a sword, like a mediaeval knight. There was something indomitable about the overall composition, something magnificent and not merely "nice"...

Truth in beauty? There was something in that. But this was pure fancy. I wadded up the foolscap sheet and threw it into the back of my wardrobe, and went to sleep.

* * *

_(Author's Note: I consider this story complete as it is. All the same ... I have this idea that it could continue, finally ending with Susan marrying Sebastian. I know, crack pairing. But I think I could make it work, I'm just not sure how yet...)_


End file.
